Working in an international team: the chinese perspective

5    1. Introduction Recent decades have been characterized by big waves of cross-national migration around the world. The winning countries of this phenomenon have been, as history demonstrates it, Australia, United States and Canada. Nonetheless with the recent Europe enlargement and the fall of the ‘iron curtail’, lot of Western nations have been experiencing a big wave of immigration as well. The biggest recent exodus has been without any doubt the one which has characterized the Asian region with the Chinese country poles apart. Nowadays multicultural diversity is no more an option but it has to be considered as the starting point for every type of organization. Although very popular in the recent decades, studies in cross-cultural management have not a long history. As Adler (1983) writes, in the eighties less Abstract The rapid ethnic and cultural diversification of the labor force, and the expansion of the businesses overseas in the recent decades, have been reflected by an increasing interest to cross-cultural issues in management. Several studies on the general field of cross-cultural management have been conducted in the recent years, in line with the big waves of industrialization of numerous countries. Many studies are mainly focused on the subfield of cross- cultural team management, however they provide a general overview on multicultural group management. Considering China as the leading country among the industrializing ones, this paper focuses on the management of international teams in China, with a particular focus on the two more industrialized cities in China: Shanghai and Beijing. This paper provides a discussion of the typical problems arising in the international project teams in China, and considers the main differences between Shanghai, the industrial center of China, and Beijing, the capital of the People Republic of China.